Open Government

EDITORIAL

Open government — a democratic idea hopefully still prized in Connecticut — has taken a devastating hit here in the past three years.

Government accountability has been threatened by the powerful, shaking the public's trust.

A top item in The Courant's agenda for the new year is to stop the attacks on good-government principles by the governor and General Assembly.

The 2014 legislative session will be a short one in an election year — which means politicians will declare sensitive subjects off-limits. But lawmakers and the governor must be pressed to right their wrongs.

Watchdogs Defanged

Connecticut's watchdog commissions are devoted to keeping government's doors and records open to the public and to catching officials who break ethics and election laws. Their independence has been compromised.

The legislature in 2013 stopped a draconian Malloy administration proposal to strip the Freedom of Information Commission, the Office of State Ethics and the State Elections Enforcement Commission of their legal staffs and budgeting authority.

Earlier Malloy "consolidation," ratified by lawmakers, was bad enough. It robbed the agencies of staff, resources and autonomy, forcing them to do less of their important work such as auditing lobbyist filings and making them take longer to process FOI complaints.

The watchdogs were also put under the thumb of a gubernatorial appointee, creating a conflict of interest. (This week, the governor appointed Shelby J. Brown of East Hartford to the position.) A watchdog agency can't effectively investigate a complaint against an executive branch agency if it ultimately reports to the governor.

The watchdogs' full autonomy should be restored by the legislature. These agencies really don't belong together. At the very least, the power to appoint the executive administrator should be taken from the governor.

The legislature should also expand the jurisdiction of the Office of State Ethics to cover municipalities, with one statute for all towns instead of each having its own set of rules.

The Curtain Descends

In 2013, what seemed like an unprecedented attack was unleashed on the state's Freedom of Information law and the whole idea of open government.

Proposals that could close all parole hearings to the public were introduced. As were measures to dramatically redefine public meetings to close more of them.

So was a state police request to charge anyone $16 just to inspect a public record. Plans to put heretofore public death certificates in the deep freeze were advanced.

These government-secrecy initiatives ultimately failed. But freedom-of-information advocates are on guard because there were so many of them. It is still a dangerous time for the cause of open government.

And arguably the most worrisome proposal was passed into law. It was an exemption for crime scene photographs and other evidence from the mandatory release provision of the FOI law — material that up until now has largely been treated as open to the public.

A response to the Newtown massacre, the law was negotiated in secret without a public hearing and was meant to spare the feelings of families of Adam Lanza's victims.

This is an example of good intentions making bad law.

The fear that homicide photos would go viral is unfounded. The crime-scene photos from the 2007 Petit home invasion, for example, are public record, but the only ones found on the Internet are from the trials of the murderers.

Neither have bloggers nor media organizations published crime-scene photos from the Hartford Distributors shooting in 2010 or from the lottery headquarters shooting in 1998.

Ironically, police sometimes release crime-scene evidence to catch killers, as they did with the 2009 Park Street hit-and-run video. This law would handcuff the authorities.

The law should be repealed. And freedom-of-information legislation should always receive a public hearing.

Other Transparency Items

State officials need to conduct state business exclusively on their public "ct.gov" email account, not on private accounts such as gmail. Email communications must be recoverable.

And we still support any new effort to grant investigative subpoena power to state prosecutors.

This is the fourth item on The Courant's agenda list for the state for 2014. To see the entire list, go to http://www.courant.com/opinion.